Stuck in a remote, abandoned town, you must lead five survivors with conflicting motivations, fragile relationships and fiery prejudices to safety from the roving undead. A sophisticated engine generates new survivors, towns and content so every adventure is a different experience, and you can use built-in editors to add yourself and...

Buy Zafehouse: Diaries

Recommended By Curators

"Because it was made in Australia."

About This Game

Stuck in a remote, abandoned town, you must lead five survivors with conflicting motivations, fragile relationships and fiery prejudices to safety from the roving undead. A sophisticated engine generates new survivors, towns and content so every adventure is a different experience, and you can use built-in editors to add yourself and others to the game.

Features

Deal with the volatile relationships of your survivors by strategically assigning them to tasks, siding with them on difficult decisions or seeding rumours about their past

Experience a fresh story each time you play as the procedural engine crafts new survivors, towns and content

Built-in editors make it easy to add yourself and your friends to the game. Create your own survival horror story in your hometown

Unique diary interface records each action, choice and disaster. Save your heroic story and share it with others

Zafehouse: Diaries is a fresh take on the zombie / survival horror genre. If you're sick of mindless shooters or generic-looking top down affairs that just don't get what the zombie genre is about, this is the game for you.

About Screwfly Studios

We're a two-man developer based in Australia, dedicated to creating deep, innovative strategy games for PC. Zafehouse: Diaries is Screwfly's debut title and the spiritual successor to the highly-regarded Zafehouse.

I wanted to like this game but it lacked the required developer's attention.You end up being frustrated because you get dragged into an addictive game that is BROKEN :

1. The survivor relations system is a dissapointment.The tools you get to manipulate them are way too few and simplistic for the amount of outbreaks your group has to face.2. Inventory system is generally underdeveloped when it should have been the center of devs attention.You cant chose which survivor should equip a designated item. Ged used to seeing a janitor with a broken arm charge in with a butter knife while while an armored full health bartender unloads all his ammo on two zombies and barely wounding them.3.Unbeatable. Trust me,with all the RNG in this game it'll take you around 20 attempts to even start making progress. Zombie numbers increase constantly,you cant abandon breaching buildings (and end up storming infested ones without any reliable option to scout it or reduce zombie numbers).

Its a TEXT-BASED GAME.How hard can it be to just finish it? Instead you get a bunch of fanboys telling you garbage like "In before times there were no patches for games after they were out!!!!" or "You can mod using mods from THIS or THAT dead website!"Overall a very punishing expirience. 3/10

At first, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by this game. Agressor dilemmas are perhaps a little more regular than you'd like, and its easy for your group to fall apart as a result of arguments and disputes. However, when you actually get into this game and develop a strategy, the majority of these things are either avoidable or fixable with a little effort.

Whilst there are plenty of FPS zombie games around (dear lord, someone make it stop), survival and reclaiming games such as this or Rebuild 3 are rarer. This game is very clever in forcing you to depend on not just your supplies but also the status of the members in your group to stay alive, providing a much more realistic post-apocalypse survival experience.

Of course, your group is varied every time in terms of background, age, gender, sexual preference, fitness and abailities, and with a randomly genereated map each game, no playing experience is like the one before. This variability gives the game an epic amount of replayability and - should you complete the three main campaigns - the game has an easy to use in-game custom content creator. Want to survive the apocalypse with your friends or the characters from your favourite TV show? Go ahead! Add pictures, careers, skills and personal abilities to your custom characters, playable in an endless sandbox game or on the campaigns.

Many reviews on here will complain that the group argues too much which causes everything to fall apart - cook a large meal and everyone will get along. Don't have enough food for a large meal? Break into a store. Dont have the weaponry to break into a store? Modify your weapons to create spiked bats and double barreled hand guns so that you CAN breach the store. Create a stronghold at the police station, steal medical supplies from the hospital. THIS. IS. A . STRATEGY. GAME. You can't just expect everything to go dandy,

This game is a challenge, and I love that. It has a stand out format with a fresh new style and thoughtful gameplay. I couldn't recommend it more.

tl;dr -> Survivor 1 was racist against Asians, I had 3 in my squad of 5, so I sent him out to die while scouting a bank. Everyone else was happy, but eventually starved to death after a few weeks because I was intent on upgrading/modifying all the items in my warehouse instead of scouting. 11/10 realistic simulator.

I got this game in a bundle and was very excited to try it because I've played countless zombie games on gaming websites like Kongregate and Newgrounds. I was very satisfied with my experience.

If you like text-based games, the zombie post-apocalypse theme, and crafting/strategy-based gameplay, then you will enjoy this game.

The aesthetics are good, there are pictures of items you find and the delivery of the gameplay is very nice - given in the form of a journal with text/picture entries. The game is solely text-based, so do not play this if you do not like reading (or this genre). There are 3 game modes, one of which is endless (easy). The randomized character backgrounds and random events are well-done, however, one complaint I have is the very (seemingly) arbitrary way the character relationships is determined. More on this later.

The controls are simple and there is a brief tutorial to show you how to play. The learning curve is minimal to moderate depending on your experience with survival strategy games. The most challenging aspect of the game is balancing your actions (scout, search, fortify, etc) properly to maximize your chances for survival. You can modify a few elements like how often resource-generating buildings appear and whether or not characters can get injured from in-group fighting.

The gameplay consists of performing specific actions every hour (equivalent of one turn). Actions include fortifying the building you are in, searching for items, building traps, etc. You can further specify the actions by clicking on keywords that are highlighted in green - for example, you can specify an order to build "traps," "experimental traps" (indoor), or outdoor traps. Certain actions generate noise that will draw in progressively larger groups of zombies. You can counteract this by sending survivors out to patrol, or by sniping surrounding zombies (trade-off is your use of ammo and potentially drawing in more zombies). If the building you are in gets completely surrounded, your characters will be severely restricted in the actions they can do. During the night, visibility is lowered and overall danger is increased.

You can either start with 1 survivor (easy mode) or 5, however, you can only gain new members in easy mode (which is also endless mode). The survivors will have randomized stats - these are given no numerical value. Stats include social economic status (poor, middle-class, rich), job, overall personality traits, and proficiency in actions (better at cooking, scouting, etc). All characters will also have a negative attribute, such as racism or distrust of the opposite sex. You can try to mitigate this by spreading rumors - one each day, and only one of each type. Rumors can be things like a cousin relationship between two characters or a charitable act for certain people. Rumors act as a double-edged sword - it will usually increase the relationship between the associated characters, however, it can also polarize survivors that do not like the associated characters (causing them to like each other even less). The relationship mechanic is crucial to survival because characters in conflict will argue and fight - dropping the overall morale of the group and potentially injuring people. Actions are also completed significantly slower when characters in conflict are near each other, so a good idea is to send polarized characters to different areas (or even sacrificing problem survivors). You can increase relationships by having feasts, but this requires a lot of food and will draw in zombies.

There is a randomized map with different structures in the city to explore. Special buildings yield bonuses like increased security (banks) and better loot/modifying (warehouses). Once you fully secure a building, you can further fortify it - eventually adding things like watchtowers, fences, and sniper posts. Fortifying takes a significant amount of time and will most likely attract larger groups of zombies. A downside of securing/fortifying a building is going back inside it - you will always need a survivor inside to let others in. If you leave a secured/fortified building with no one inside, you will have to break back in, however, there will never be zombies within. A good idea is to at least secure a few safehouses before proceeding to fortify.

There are different approaches you can take when playing this game, adding a decent amount of replayability. Overall, if you enjoy this genre, then you should really give Zafehouse a try.

As others had said about the game, the developers haven't given this game enough attention. It's all too small and simple, even though it is a TEXT-BASED GAME. You would expect lots of complexity and story and detail set into the game, but no, it doesn't have that. Anything they attempted to be complex, is just a problem throwing a lot of info into your face, but then it has a simple solution. Anyway, time for the normal: Pros and Cons.

Pro's:-Rather addictive-Hard and challenging, along with time consuming-Able to customize with in-game workshop-Pictures and random events are nice

Cons:-Zombies are freaking weird, I killed 12 and got killed by 4 within 2 hours in-game-Way too simple for text game, you see pretty much the entire game within about 2 hours-It freaking crashes at random times-Extremely difficult without creating overpowered ♥♥♥♥ in workshop-Relationship system is retared-You see pretty much the entire game within about 2 hours

I don't recommend this game solely for that fact that it is $10, it is not worth it at all. I would be a lot more understandable at maybe $2, but at $10, I feel cheated out of my money for a game that had the potential for a hell of a lot more. Just play Rebuild and you'll have a better time.